opium

On this episode of Breaking the Set, Abby talks about yet another "apparent suicide" in Guantanamo prison, dryboarding, and how the only way to ever leave is in a body-bag. Abby interviews former CIA Officer Ray McGovern about CIA intelligence failures leading up to 9/11, the presidential daily briefings, and the PNAC neocon strategy for war. Abby Martin then talks to Afghan journalist and author of "Opium Wars" Fariba Nawa about the opium trade, opium brides, and the heroin black market. 11 years after the 9/11. Finally, Abby breaks down the systematic erosion of our civil liberties through legislation passed in a post 9/11 America.

MEDIA ROOTS- Last year marked the tenth anniversary of America's invasion of Afghanistan, officially making it the longest war in US history. Now that Osama Bin Laden is finally confirmed dead, the federal government's logic of continuing the occupation remains unclear.

Initially, the Bush administration irrationally insisted that any sovereign nation harboring terrorists was itself complicit in "terror" and therefore open for pre-emptive US military action. This rationale is absurd– just because one criminal might be living inside of a particular country doesn't make that entire country guilty of the criminal's crimes.

No one here has mentioned the topic of Mexico's bill to decriminalize the personal use of drugs so I thought I would post one of the first and very best articles about it that basically gets straight to the point. Although news of the bill is not directly related to 9/11 truth, I think it's important that people know about it as the drug wars and 9/11 wars are inextricably tied.

A bill that decriminalizes the possession of small amounts of drugs for personal use in Mexico is now the law of the land, although it will not go into effect for one year to give states time to adjust their laws. It was published Thursday in the Official Daily of the Federation, the Mexican equivalent of the Federal Register. (To read the complete text of the bill in Spanish, go to page 83 of the Official Daily.)

Since the United States invaded Afghanistan, the country’s number one cash crop, opium, has repeatedly broken production records for the country. By some estimates, the occupied territory now supplies by some 90 percent of the world’s poppies.

So far, eradication efforts have merely fueled the Taliban’s coffers and driven civilian farmers further outside of U.S. influence. Because of this, the United States has formed a new strategy in the fight against the crop: They are giving up.

“The Western policies against the opium crop, the poppy crop, have been a failure,” said Richard Holbrooke, America’s envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, speaking to a G8 conference on Afghanistan.

“They did not result in any damage to the Taliban, but they put farmers out of work. We are not going to support crop eradication. We’re going to phase it out,” he told Reuters.

The 9/11 Truth Movement has been right about NORAD, has been right about Philip Zelikow, has been right about Sibel Edmonds, has been right about the ISI's past and current connections to terrorism, has been right about a GREAT MANY THINGS. Don't you think it's time you started to listen to what we are saying? - Jon

This week the 64th British soldier to die in Afghanistan, Corporal Mike Gilyeat, was buried. All the right things were said about this brave soldier, just as, on current trends, they will be said about one or more of his colleagues who follow him next week.

The alarming escalation of the casualty rate among British soldiers in Afghanistan - up to ten per cent - led to discussion this week on whether it could be fairly compared to casualty rates in the Second World War.

Connect the dots. According to the UN's latest report, under U.S. occupation 92% of the world's opium production comes from Afghan poppies. Most of the heroin going to Europe is manufactured in or transits Turkey. The exact value to Turkey of its heroin exports is unknown but experts estimate a range in the tens of billions of dollars per year. The neocons helped establish and remain closely associated with Turkish lobbying efforts in the U.S. The question is, then: does the seamy side of Turkish influence peddling involve, among other things, money laundering, narcotics trafficking, espionage, bribery of U.S. officials, nuclear proliferation, and aid to terrorist front groups (not to mention whatever motivated the previous administration to invade Afghanistan)? Put differently, how and to what extent has the Turkish "deep state" joined forces with the American "deep state"? To consider some of these questions, and others, I turned to Sibel Edmonds, the renowned whistleblower. It was great to talk with Sibel and I have the highest regard for her courage and principled stand. Total runtime an hour and sixteen minutes. A cover-up is not the answer!

The New York Times and other major U.S. media sources commonly report on the production of opium in Afghanistan as though it were under the control of the Taliban. The facts on the ground, however, tell a different story. Who dominates the Afghan opium trade? Foreign Policy Journal investigates.

November 29, 2008

By Jeremy R. Hammond

The New York Times reported this week that the Taliban have cut back on poppy cultivation and is stockpiling opium, grossly overstating the group’s role in the Afghanistan drug trade.

“Afghanistan has produced so much opium in recent years,” the Times reported Thursday, “that the Taliban are cutting poppy cultivation and stockpiling raw opium in an effort to support prices and preserve a major source of financing for the insurgency, Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the United Nations drug office, says.”

On thursday, I called into Michael Medved's "Disagreement Day" show once again to attempt to bring up some 9-11 facts. Although I got pre-empted and distracted by Medved, I got my basic point out there early on and responded fairly adequately to his questions. Maybe I speculated a bit too much when I answered his question about the reason for the Afghanistan War with "opium money." We eventually proceeded to talking about the '93 WTC bombing. And ended up with Medved giving me earnest, heart-felt advice to not ruin my life "with this stuff."

KABUL: Delegates at a joint Pak-Afghan peace jirga last week evinced a keen interest to solve problems facing the two neighbours - including drug trafficking.

Recommendations by the fourth of five working committees underlined the need to purge Afghanistan of drugs and the Taliban insurgency and to expand the Afghanistan government’s writ beyond Kabul, officials said. The committee acknowledged Pakistan’s efforts to make the country drugs-free. It asked Kabul to follow the Islamabad way of achieving success against drugs.

Here is every article I've collected about opium production in Afghanistan following our invasion. Some have speculated that opium production was one of the main reasons we invaded Afghanistan. The idea is, a large percentage of drug money gets laundered through the American Banking System, as well as Wall Street. Sen. Carl Levin once said:

Current estimates are that $500 billion to $1 trillion in illegal funds are laundered through banks worldwide each year, with about half going through U.S. financial institutions.

At the time of our invasion, Afghanistan opium production was at an all time low because the Taliban managed to destroy a large percentage of the opium crops.

However, Mullah Omar said that if the U.S. were to invade, the farmers will be allowed to grow opium.

How lucky for "U.S. financial institutions."

I recommend the writings of Peter Dale Scott with regard to the drug trade.

In a country flooded with narcotics traffickers and corrupt government officials, one of Afghanistan’s few remaining ‘clean’ governors, Mohammed Daud, has been removed from his position, and many are blaming the drug mafia and the CIA for his abrupt dismissal.

Daud was appointed at the request of the British government in order to oversee Helmand province, the country’s largest opium producing region. The former and now possibly future governor of Helmand, Sher Muhammad Akhunzada, whom Daud replaced earlier this year, has been widely implicated in the drug trade.

Contrary to Akhunzada, “British officials regarded Mr Daud as the cleanest governor in Afghanistan and hoped that his extensive experience in development would help to win over Helmand’s population,” The Times reported.

Last month, however, the British government expressed frustration with the effort, pointing to the fact that Afghan President Hamid Karzai continued to meet with the former governor, Akhunzada. Adding further strain on the situation, Karzai appointed Akhunzada as a Senator and made his brother, Amir Muhammad Akhundzada, Daud's deputy.

"The president is undermining his own governor," one British official toldThe Times. "It doesn’t help what we’re trying to do."

It would appear U.S. officials, particularly from the Central Intelligence Agency, were influencing Karzai’s actions, undercutting the efforts of their British counterparts. Moreover, as The Independent reported, “British sources have blamed pressure from the CIA for President Hamid Karzai's decision to dismiss Mohammed Daud as governor".

“The Americans knew Daud was a main British ally,” one official explained to The Independent, “yet they deliberately undermined him and told Karzai to sack him.”

The United Nations has announced that opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan has soared and is expected to increase by 59% in 2006. The production of opium is estimated to have increased by 49% in relation to 2005.

The Western media in chorus blame the Taliban and the warlords. The Bush administration is said to be committed to curbing the Afghan drug trade: "The US is the main backer of a huge drive to rid Afghanistan of opium... "

Yet in a bitter irony, US military presence has served to restore rather than eradicate the drug trade.

What the reports fail to acknowledge is that the Taliban government was instrumental in implementing a successful drug eradication program, with the support and collaboration of the UN.

Implemented in 2000-2001, the Taliban's drug eradication program led to a 94 percent decline in opium cultivation. In 2001, according to UN figures, opium production had fallen to 185 tons. Immediately following the October 2001 US led invasion, production increased dramatically, regaining its historical levels.

KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghanistan’s world-leading opium cultivation rose a “staggering” 60 percent this year, the U.N. anti-drugs chief announced Saturday in urging the government to crack down on big traffickers and remove corrupt officials and police.

The record crop yielded 6,100 tons of opium, or enough to make 610 tons of heroin — outstripping the demand of the world’s heroin users by a third, according to U.N. figures.

Officials warned that the illicit trade is undermining the Afghan government, which is under attack by Islamic militants that a U.S.-led offensive helped drive from power in late 2001 for harboring Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida bases.

“The news is very bad. On the opium front today in some of the provinces of Afghanistan, we face a state of emergency,” Antonio Maria Costa, chief of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, said at a news conference. “In the southern provinces, the situation is out of control.”